Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
ODYSSEUS: These things, Circe, I think I have learned and shall remember. But I would gladly ask you whether among these creatures you have any Greeks, men whom you have turned from human beings into wolves and lions. CIRCE: Many indeed, my longed-for Odysseus. But why do you ask this? ODYSSEUS: Because, by Zeus, it seems to me it would be a fine ambition toward the Greeks, if by your favor I could take these men and restore them once more to their human companions, and not stand by and watch them grow old, contrary to nature, in the bodies of beasts, living a life so pitiable and dishonored.
CIRCE: This man thinks that his ambition ought to become a misfortune not only for himself and his companions, but even for those who have nothing to do with him — out of sheer foolishness. ODYSSEUS: Now you are stirring up another such brew of words, Circe, and drugging me besides — quite simply turning me into a beast myself, if I am to be persuaded that it is a misfortune for a man to become a human being out of a beast. CIRCE: Have you not already done things stranger than these — you, who abandoned the deathless and ageless life with me for a mortal woman, and, as I say, an already-aging one, and through countless further troubles you hasten on, so that you may become, from this, still more looked-upon and celebrated than you are now, pursuing an empty good and a phantom instead of the truth?
ODYSSEUS: Let that be as you say, Circe. Why should we quarrel so often over the same matters? But release these men for me and grant them to me. CIRCE: Not so simply, by Hecate — for they are not just anyone's to give. Rather, ask them first whether they wish it. And if they say no, then argue with them, noble sir, and persuade them; but if you fail to persuade them, and instead they get the better of you in argument, let that be proof enough of how badly you have counseled both yourself and your friends. ODYSSEUS: Why do you mock me, blessed one? For how could these creatures either give an account or receive one, so long as they are asses and swine and lions? CIRCE: Take courage,
most ambitious of men — I will provide you with beings who both understand and can converse; or rather, one alone will suffice, both to give and to receive an account on behalf of all. Here, speak with this one. ODYSSEUS: And what shall we call him, Circe? Or who was this man among men? CIRCE: What has that to do with the argument? But call him, if you like, Gryllus. I shall withdraw from the two of you, lest it seem to him that he is arguing to please me against his own judgment.
GRYLLUS: Greetings, Odysseus. ODYSSEUS: And to you, by Zeus, Gryllus. GRYLLUS: What do you wish to ask? ODYSSEUS: Knowing that you have been human beings, I pity all of you who are in this condition, but it seems likely to me that I should feel more for those of you who, being Greeks, have fallen into this misfortune. So now I have made a request of Circe, that she release whichever of you wishes it, restore him again to his original form, and send him back with us.
GRYLLUS: Stop, Odysseus, and say nothing further — for we all despise you as well, seeing that you seemed in vain to be a formidable man and to surpass the rest of mankind by far in wisdom, you who feared this very thing — the change from worse to better — without even examining it. For just as children fear the physicians' medicines and flee the treatments that, by changing them from sick and senseless, make them healthier and wiser,
so you shrank from becoming other than you were; and now you yourself, trembling and full of dread, live with Circe in fear that she may unknowingly turn you into a pig or a wolf, and you try to persuade us — who live amid boundless good things — to abandon these together with her who provides them, and sail off with you, we who are the most fortune-loving of all creatures, to become human beings once more. ODYSSEUS: To me, Gryllus, it seems that you have had not only your form but also your mind corrupted by that draught, and have become full of strange and thoroughly disfigured opinions — or has some pleasure of long familiarity bewitched you toward this body? GRYLLUS: Neither of these, O
king of the Cephallenians. But if you are willing rather to converse than to abuse, I shall quickly change your mind, since I have experience of both ways of life, as to why we reasonably prefer this one to that. ODYSSEUS: Well then, I am eager to listen. GRYLLUS: And we, in turn, are ready to speak. We must begin first from the virtues, on account of which we see you men pride yourselves greatly, supposing that you far surpass the beasts in justice
and prudence and courage and the other virtues. Answer me then, wisest of men: I once heard you telling Circe about the land of the Cyclopes, how, though it is not ploughed at all, nor does anyone plant anything in it, it is so good and noble in its nature that it brings forth all its fruits of itself. Which, then, do you praise more —
that land, or your own goat-pasturing, rugged Ithaca, which, only after much labor and through great toil, yields small and meager returns scarcely worth anything to those who till it? And do not take it hard that, contrary to what appears true, you answer out of affection for your homeland. ODYSSEUS: But one must not lie. I love and cherish my own homeland and country more, yet I admire
and marvel at that other. GRYLLUS: Shall we not then say this holds true — that the wisest of men thinks it right to praise and approve one thing, but to choose and cherish another? And I think you have made the same judgment concerning the soul as well; for it is the same case as with the land — that the better soul is the one which, without toil, brings forth virtue like a spontaneous crop, as if of its own nature. ODYSSEUS:
Let that too stand as you say. GRYLLUS: Do you now, then, agree that the soul of beasts is by nature better suited to the production of virtue, and more complete — since, unordered and untaught, like a field unsown and unploughed, it brings forth and increases, according to nature, the virtue proper to each kind? ODYSSEUS: And of what virtue, pray, Gryllus, do beasts have a share? GRYLLUS: Of what virtue indeed do they not have a greater share than even the wisest of
men? Consider first, if you will, courage — the very virtue in which you take such pride, and are not ashamed to be called "bold" and "sacker of cities," you who, most wretched of men, deceiving with tricks and stratagems men who knew only the plain and noble way of war and were inexperienced in deceit and falsehood, attach the name of virtue to what is in fact cunning — though virtue least of all admits of cunning. But as for the beasts, look at their
struggles against one another and against you — how guileless and artless they are, and how, with open and naked confidence, they make their defenses out of genuine strength; and neither summoned by law nor fearing indictment for desertion, but by nature fleeing being mastered, each endures to the very end and preserves its unconquered spirit — for they are not defeated in spirit even when overpowered in body, nor do their souls give up, but
they die fighting in the struggle itself. And often, when many are dying, their strength, together with their spiritedness, withdraws somewhere and, gathering about some one part of the body, resists the one who is killing it, and leaps up and rages, until, like a fire, it is utterly quenched and perishes. There is no supplication in them, no plea for pity, no admission of defeat; nor does lion serve lion, or horse serve horse, out of cowardice,
as man serves man, readily embracing the name that cowardice earns him. As for those creatures that men have subdued by traps or trickery, the ones already full-grown, having refused food and endured thirst, welcome and embrace death before slavery; but their young — cubs and chicks — being, because of their age, tractable and soft, men win over with many deceptive blandishments and gentle contrivances, drugging them and making them taste
pleasures contrary to nature, and in time reduce them, through their manner of life, to helplessness, until they accept and submit to what is called "taming" — a kind of emasculation, as it were, of their spirit. From this it is above all clear that beasts are by nature well-disposed toward courage. But for men, plain speaking of the truth is itself something contrary to nature; and from this, most excellent Odysseus, you might best learn it: among beasts, nature balances the capacity for combat equally,
and the female is in no way inferior to the male; both toil at the labors that necessity demands and contend in the struggles on behalf of their young. Why, you have heard of a certain sow of Crommyon, a female creature, who caused Theseus a great deal of trouble; and that Sphinx — her cleverness, sitting up on Mount Phicium and weaving riddles and puzzles,
would have done her no good had she not far surpassed the Cadmeans in strength and courage. And they say that a Teumessian vixen too was "a fearsome thing," and near Delphi a serpent once fought Apollo alone in single combat over the oracle. And your own king took the mare Aethe from the man of Sicyon as the price of exemption from military service — counseling well indeed, since he preferred a good and eager-to-win mare to a cowardly man. And you yourself
have often seen leopardesses and lionesses, how the females yield nothing to the males in spirit and courage — unlike your own wife, who, while you are at war, sits at home by the hearth-fire — not even the swallows, though females, fail to defend themselves against those who approach them and their nests, and that though they are but ordinary birds. Why then should I still mention to you the women of Caria or of Maeonia?
But from these examples it is clear that men do not possess courage by nature; for otherwise women too would possess strength equally. And so you men, under the compulsion of laws — not willingly nor gladly, but enslaved to customs and to reproaches and to opinions imposed from outside and shaped by argument — you practice courage and undertake toils and dangers, not because you have confidence in the face of these things,
but because you fear other things more than these. Just as, among your own companions, the one who is first to leap up for the light oar does so not out of contempt for it, but out of fear and flight from the heavier one — so too the man who endures a blow, in order not to receive wounds, and who, to avoid some outrage or death, wards off an enemy, is not bold in the face of that danger but a coward in the face of the other. Thus
your courage has been revealed to be a prudent cowardice, and your boldness a fear that has learned to avoid one thing by means of another. And in general, if you think you are better than the beasts in respect of courage, why is it that your own poets call those who fight most valiantly against the enemy "wolf-hearted" and "lion-spirited" and "like a boar in strength" — but none of them ever calls a lion "man-spirited"
or a boar "like a man in strength"? But just as, I suppose, they call the swift "wind-footed" and the beautiful "godlike," surpassing them by their images, so too, when praising those formidable in battle, they liken them to their betters. And the reason is that spiritedness is, as it were, the tempering and hardening of courage, and the beasts employ it undiluted in their struggles, whereas in you men,
when it mingles with reasoning, it withdraws before danger like wine mixed with water, and abandons the critical moment. And some among you say that spiritedness ought not to be admitted into battle at all, but should be set aside, so that one may make use of sober reasoning — speaking rightly as regards safety and self-preservation, but most disgracefully as regards strength and defense. For how is it not absurd
to blame nature for not furnishing your bodies with stings, or defensive teeth, or hooked claws, while you yourselves strip away and curtail the innate weapon of the soul? ODYSSEUS: Well now, Gryllus, you seem to me to have become a formidable sophist, seeing that even now, speaking out of your pig's estate, you have set upon this subject so vigorously. But why do you not go on next to discuss temperance?
GRYLLUS: Because I thought you would take issue with what I had already said. But you are eager to hear about temperance, since you are the husband of a most chaste wife, and think you yourself have given proof of temperance by scorning the delights of Circe's bed. And in this respect you differ not at all from any of the beasts as regards self-restraint — for they too have no desire to consort with their betters, but direct their pleasures and
their loves toward their own kind. It is no wonder, then, if — just as the Mendesian he-goat in Egypt, they say, though penned with many beautiful women, was not eager to mate with them but was rather smitten with the she-goats — so you too, delighting in accustomed pleasures, though a man, are unwilling to sleep with a goddess. As for the chastity of Penelope, countless crows, cawing, will make it a laughingstock and hold it in contempt,
for each of them, if her mate dies, remains a widow not for a short time but for nine generations of men — so that your fair Penelope falls nine times short in chastity of whichever crow you please. But since you have not escaped my notice as a sophist yourself, come, let me use some order in my argument, first setting a definition of temperance, and then dividing the desires by kind. Temperance, then, is a certain brevity
and order of the desires, doing away with those that are imported and superfluous, while adorning, with timeliness and moderation, those that are necessary. Among the desires you observe, I suppose, countless differences: that concerning food and drink has, along with what is natural, also what is necessary; but the desires of sexual pleasure, to which nature gives the beginnings, may also, I think,
be adequately satisfied by one who abstains from indulging them — natural, but not called necessary. As for the class that is neither necessary nor natural but poured in from outside through empty opinion, owing to want of taste, it has, among your kind, all but hidden away nearly all the natural desires beneath its multitude — possessing them the way a foreign, immigrant crowd forces its way among a people, overpowering the native citizens. But the beasts, keeping their souls utterly untrodden by
and unmixed with these imported passions, and their lives, far removed as if from the sea of empty opinion, fall short of living in a refined and extravagant manner, but temperance, and even more, good order among their desires — desires that dwell with them neither in great numbers nor as strangers — is very strictly preserved. I myself, at any rate, was once no less struck than you are now by gold, as a possession comparable to nothing else,
and silver and ivory captivated me; and whoever possessed the most of these seemed to me a blessed and god-favored man, whether he were a Phrygian or a Carian, baser than Dolon and more ill-fated than Priam. And so, ever hung upon my desires in this matter, I derived neither gratitude nor pleasure from other things, though they were abundant and sufficient, but found fault with my own
life, as though it were deprived of the greatest goods and left destitute of blessings. So too, as I remember seeing you in Crete, adorned in festal attire, I did not admire your prudence or your virtue, but doted and stood agape at the exquisite fineness of your tunic and the crimped richness and beauty of your purple cloak — and there was something, I think, in the brooch too, a gold trinket wrought with fine engraving — I followed after you bewitched, like the women.
But now, freed from those empty opinions and purified of them, I disregard gold and silver, passing them by like any other stones, and I would find no more pleasure, by Zeus, in your fine mantles and carpets than I would in being sunk to my fill in deep, soft mud and reposing there. Such desires, imported from outside, take root in none of our souls; rather, our life is governed for the most part by desires and pleasures that are necessary, and for the rest by desires that, while not necessary, are natural — desires which we indulge neither disorderly nor insatiably. Let us go through these first.
The pleasure that arises, appropriately, from things fragrant and stimulating to the sense of smell by their exhalations serves, besides the benefit it gives freely and simply, also a certain use: it contributes to the discernment of food. For the tongue is the judge — and is said to be the judge — of the sweet, the pungent, and the astringent, whenever the various flavors, coming into contact with the organ of taste, produce some blending; but our sense of smell, being a judge of each thing's quality even before the flavors reach the tongue, and perceiving far more discerningly than the royal food-tasters, admits what is proper within and drives away what is foreign, not allowing it even to touch or trouble the taste, but denouncing and condemning its worthlessness before any harm is done.
But other things do not trouble us at all — as they trouble you: your incense and cinnamon and spikenard and leaves and Arabian reeds, which by a certain dread and staining art called perfumery you are compelled to blend and combine into one and consume together, buying at great cost an effeminate, girlish luxury useful for nothing whatsoever. And though it is such a thing, it has corrupted not only all women but by now most men as well, so that they are unwilling even to have intercourse with their own wives unless the women come to them reeking of perfumes and powders.
But boars seek out sows, and goats seek out she-goats, and other females draw their mates to themselves by their own natural scents, redolent of pure dew and meadows and green grass, and come together for mating out of a shared goodwill — the females not coyly withholding themselves nor putting forward, in place of desire, deceits and enchantments and refusals, nor the males, driven by frenzy and lust, purchasing the act of generation with payments and toil and servitude, but pursuing an Aphrodite that is guileless and unbought, in season, who, rousing the desire of animals at the proper time of year as she rouses the budding of plants, straightway extinguishes it again — the female no longer admitting the male once she has conceived, nor the male still attempting her. So small and weak a value does pleasure hold among us, and so entirely does nature govern instead. Hence neither male with male nor female with female has the desire of beasts, up to this very day, brought about any such union.
But among you many such things occur even among the solemn and the good — I say nothing of the worthless. Agamemnon roamed all Boeotia hunting the fleeing Argynnus, falsely blaming the sea and the winds for his failure, and then, plunging himself, handsome as he was, into the Copaic lake, thinking there to quench his passion and free himself of his desire. Heracles likewise, in pursuit of a beardless companion, fell behind the champions and betrayed the expedition. And in the round temple of Ptoan Apollo someone of yours secretly inscribed, 'Achilles is beautiful' — though Achilles by then already had a son; and I am told the letters remain to this day. A cock that mounts another cock, in the absence of a hen, is burned alive, according to some seer or interpreter of portents who declares the thing to be a great and terrible omen.
Thus even among human beings themselves it is agreed that beasts have more claim to self-control, and do not do violence to nature for the sake of pleasures. But your unbridled appetites, having not even the law as an ally, nature confines within no bounds, but they are borne along, as if by a torrent, and in many places, driven by desire, produce dreadful outrage and disorder and confusion in the province of nature's own sexual order. Indeed men have attempted intercourse with goats and sows and mares, and women have gone mad with lust for male beasts; for from such unions arise, among you, Minotaurs and Aegipans and, I suppose, Sphinxes and Centaurs as well. Yet a dog, driven by hunger, has once eaten a man out of necessity, and a bird has tasted human flesh; but no beast has ever attempted to use a human being for intercourse.
But men treat beasts as objects for this purpose and for many others besides, doing violence and transgressing law for the sake of pleasure. And so, base and incontinent as they are with regard to the desires just mentioned, men are shown to be still further wanting in self-control with respect to the necessary desires, falling far short of beasts — I mean those concerning food and drink. We take our pleasure always together with some measure of need, but you, pursuing pleasure rather than what accords with nature in your diet, are punished with many long illnesses, which, drawn from the single source of surfeit, fill your bodies with all manner of foul and hard-to-purge humors.
For in the first place, to each kind of animal one food is proper by nature — to some grass, to others a certain root or fruit; and those that eat flesh do not turn to any other kind of prey, nor do they take away the food of the weaker, but allow them to graze in peace: the lion lets the deer feed, and the wolf the sheep. But man, led on by gluttony to all pleasures, trying and tasting everything as though he had not yet learned what is fitting and proper for him, has become the only omnivorous creature among all that exist. And he makes use of flesh in the first place not out of any want or helplessness, when it is always in his power, according to the season, to gather and take and pluck one thing after another from plants and seeds without wearying from their abundance; but out of luxury and satiety with what is necessary, he pursues unfit and impure foods through the slaughter of animals, proving far more savage than the wildest beasts. Blood and slaughter and flesh are the proper food of kite and wolf and serpent, but for man they are a relish.
Then again, though he makes use of every kind, unlike the beasts, which abstain from most and war against only a few out of the necessity of food, there is virtually nothing winged or swimming or land-dwelling that escapes what are called, by you, your civilized and hospitable tables. Well then — but you use these as relishes to season your food: why then do you go after these very things themselves as if they were your food? But the practical wisdom of beasts gives no place to useless and vain arts, but produces the necessary ones not as imported from others nor taught for hire nor glued together laboriously by practice, piecing each item of knowledge to the next, but brings them forth from itself, at once, as if native-born and innate.
We hear that all the Egyptians are physicians; but every single animal is not only self-taught in the art of healing, but also in providing for its sustenance, and for defense, hunting, guarding, and whatever measure of music befits each according to its nature. From whom, indeed, did we learn, when sick, to go to the rivers for the sake of crabs? Who taught tortoises, after eating viper, to eat oregano afterward? Or the Cretan goats, whenever they are struck by arrows, to seek out dittany, which when eaten causes them to expel the arrowheads? For if you say — as is true — that nature is the teacher of these things, you thereby attribute to the beasts' practical wisdom the most sovereign and wisest of principles; and if you think this ought not to be called reason or wisdom, then it is time to look for a finer and more honorable name for it, since indeed it also displays, through its works, a power both better and more admirable — not ignorant nor untaught, but rather self-taught and self-sufficient, not through weakness but through the strength and perfection of a virtue that accords with nature, content to forgo the borrowed collecting of wisdom from others through learning.
Whatever things, at any rate, men pursue in their idleness or their play by way of learning and practicing, in these the animals' intelligence, even against the nature of their bodies, and by sheer abundance of understanding, takes up the lessons. I say nothing of hounds tracking by scent or colts practicing to walk in rhythm, but rather of crows conversing and dogs leaping through revolving hoops. Horses and oxen in theaters master reclinings and dances and precarious postures and movements not at all easy even for men, learning and remembering them, though they serve no useful purpose at all beyond a display of aptitude for learning.
And if you doubt that we learn arts, hear also that we teach them. Partridges, in fleeing with their chicks, train them to hide themselves and, falling on their backs, to hold up a clod of earth in place of themselves with their feet; and you see how, on the rooftops, the grown storks guide their young, still practicing, in the art of flight. Nightingales teach their young to sing beforehand; but those that are caught still very young and reared in human hands sing worse, as though they had graduated from their teacher too soon. Now that I have sunk into this body, I marvel at those arguments by which I was once persuaded by the sophists to consider all creatures except man irrational and senseless.
Odysseus: Well then, Gryllus, you have now so changed that you make out even the sheep and the ass to be rational?
Gryllus: Yes indeed, most excellent Odysseus, precisely from these very examples one must draw conclusions about the nature of beasts — that it is not without a share of reason and understanding. For just as no one tree is more or less inanimate than another, but all stand equally toward insensibility, since none of them has any share in soul, so it did not seem that one animal was more sluggish and slower to learn than another in the matter of intelligence, unless all of them shared, in different measure, in reason and understanding — some more, some less. Consider also that the stupidity and dullness of some are exposed by the cunning and sharpness of others, when you compare fox and wolf and bee to ass and sheep — just as if you compared Polyphemus to yourself, or that Corinthian, Homer, to your grandfather Autolycus.
For I do not think the distance between one beast and another is as great as that between one man and another in intelligence, reasoning, and memory.
Odysseus: But take care, Gryllus, lest it be a fearful and violent thing to deny reason to those in whom no notion of god arises.
Gryllus: Then are we not to say, Odysseus, that you, being so wise and outstanding, have become a second Sisyphus?